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I just looked at the campaign to get back in the game nooooooooo
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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I've put a lot of thought into this. At the risk of dying on the stupidest hill imaginable, I hate calling LLMs "plagiarism machines" because from my own political perspective the entire notion of private property needs to be done away with. Including intellectual property and the royalties collected on it. I also hate the ethical arguments surrounding their tendency to put artists out of work, which I am seeing a lot of in this thread. I know not everyone here is explicitly Marxist. There's a lot of syndicalists, anarchists, etc. But in my understanding there is no ethical consumption OR production under capitalism. Working class people producing primary necessities like food have been put out of work by machines for nearly two centuries now. At the beginning of all this there was a luddite movement that destroyed machinery, but this destruction of machinery did not result in their re-employment, because a few scattered and frustrated actions against technology, not grounded in any political theory, cannot turn back the clock of the historical development of technology. If the luddites, who showed up at factories and actually burned and wrecked machines were not successful at stopping the tidal wave of technology, how much less successful will you be with scattered boycotts against indie steam games that use AI art here and there? The proliferation of means of production drives down the price of labor power, because it decreases the socially-necessary (average) labor time required to produce goods. Artists are just the latest victims of what machines have been doing for two centuries. Your disappointment and moral indignation will not stop the ruthlessness of capital in finding the cheapest sources of labor power possible in order to maximize profits and minimize turnaround time. Your aesthetic disgust with the face melt and extra fingers will not make most consumers care, because consumers of video games are by and large not a political block perfectly aligned with the interests of downwardly-mobile artists. Your meme desire to initiate some kind of "butlerian jihad" against the thinking machines will prove no more successful than the luddites in the textile mills 2 centuries ago. What AI really represents is the inherent instability of the capitalist system as a whole. It is a crisis of overproduction. They pump out commodities so quickly and so cheaply that their price falls to nothing, but they throw so many people into unemployment at the same time. I don't say this to be cruel to artists. I have been an artist. I've never made money from it. It's something I've only been able to cultivate in my free time. I understand the frustration. I just think the AI is not going back in the box and the political mobilization needs to be revolutionary mobilization against the mode of production as a whole and not desperate disorganized attacks at particular features of it, like particular technological advances.
I leave you with Marx (Capital: Volume 1)
(if it's any consolation I also disagree with the take that LLMs "bring means of production to the workers" or whatever because workers don't actually own the LLMs.)
(I do however think it allows disabled people to do art)
Hey comrade, I appreciate your thoughts and I am very sorry but I woke up with a fever and spent the day reading so I am not able to read your message right now.
ayy no worries
it's always for whoever's interested
get well soon!
Not saying this, the game just is worse for that because it breaks with the unique style and vision that made it great as an indie game to have rather generic pictures whose vision is a collage or pastiche applied in a fundamentally less creative manner. I will probably still play it and replace everybody's face with Corn Man. I don't think it's idealist or impractical to recognize that or makes it my political mission to stop AI and AI only. I do think that argument is somewhat of a thought-killing cliche because it boils down to something you can blurt out whenever something of cultural value gets turned to shit. There is a point to driving home the alienation and agitating among the roadkills of capitalism instead of indulging its excesses by projecting forward in time the historical trajectory we can expect under full domination of the bourgeoisie.
Will my complaints bring communism? No. We all can do better in identifying the correct major contradictions to latch onto and organize people around them. That doesn't preclude having correct stances on other topics. Luckily complaining about AI is a minor part of my daily life.
The plagiarism machine was a flippant way of spicing up the title on an-offhand post, not a coherent analysis, meaning to poke fun at the "AI" idea. Of course I don't love property rights either and think they are a drag on society, the artist as a job thing is also meh - which correct criticism as part of a political platform would identify.
I have not developed a final assessment of art production, but LLM story telling is fundamentally not creative (something it shares with capitalist forms of art production in tendency, but by eliminating the subject of the artist, moves to another qualitative level). The same goes for other artistic production. The possibility for new styles to emerge and for breaks in cultural communication will be further restricted, culture will become more stream-lined and dominated by bourgeois needs. It's not "luddite" or "anti-progress" to point that out. I remind you that a part of Gramsci's theory of Hegemony is identifiying the ruling block's position with "progress".
Artists, and there are a lot of artists with left sympathies (do you think most people that do furry commissions make their main living out of that?), will not lead the revolution and we most likely will have your scenario happen to most extent unless AI collapses under a profitability crisis. Sure. But in the right now, the only way LLM will be able to "replace" the workers is when capitalists think they can browbeat writer studios with the threat of them to weaken labor struggles or by putting pretty off-putting pictures in there instead of shoving $500 at an art student. We don't live in the time where AI junk has finally killed the arts. We live in the now.
In total, I find the response of "it's gonna happen anyway" to be defeatist and missing the point.
Friendly disagreement. What allows disabled people to do art is bullying the snobs and bullies in art circles that drive disabled people out.
revising this. There are creative ways to do LLMs, but not in the sense of production of porn, trying to write a batman movie script or other stuff - it's things like making characters sing slly songs etc
I don't see how the two things (tools for people to use and prevention of discrimination) are mutually exclusive
Apologies. I had no way of knowing which of these things it was supposed to be and shouldn't have begun by assuming it was supposed to be a coherent analysis.
Got ya. Makes sense.
I think it's a matter of outlining/brainstorming vs. actual creative work. Instead of telling it to write for you, you ask it to give you options and then you either come up with a better option, or choose an option and write it yourself. It can maximize the amount of time you do art and minimize the amount of time you spend working on bullet pointed outlines and other "office work" that you do before you do art. Also a tool is only as creative as its user. You can use these things creatively. You ask it questions like "what are some common frameworks to tackle problem X" and then you still research and choose and use the framework you want. It just lists concepts you may not have previously been familiar with. As for it using a lot of fossil fuel, that is more of an infrastructural problem. We aren't exclusively using renewable energy as a society, so everything we do with electricity uses fossil fuel.
I don't think it eliminates the subject of the artist though. It's a tool that will get used by artists. People said the same thing about photoshop, 3D editors. etc.
this is built into the mode of production itself, not the tools people use
The following is intended to be read in a neutral tone: I don't understand why quotes are around "anti-progress" since I did not use those words in my original post which you are responding to. I am unsure what part of my post you're responding to. I hope you don't think I was calling you a luddite. I wasn't calling you a luddite: Which I don't view as a pejorative in any case. I was pointing out that the luddites had a very good reason to be mad and their methods proved ineffective. They weren't against "progress" they were against losing their jobs. They lost their jobs because of capitalism, not machinery. I don't view technology as some kind of moral or ethical progress. I just think it's impossible to make everyone stop using a tool once it has been invented. It's "pandora's box". The only way technology stops getting used is if the means of producing it dry up.
I wasn't speculating that AI junk killed the arts nor was I speculating what would lead to revolution.
I'm not defeatist, I just think we should organize against the mode of production and not the means of production. I thought that was clear in my original post.
ok, that wasnt clear. I was having some other shit going on (feel free to look at my other comments today) when replying so I might have become defensive.
ok, my intention was to point the misuse of the means of production in light-hearted way (though I am sceptical about positive use cases for "AI", I am not super serious on here bc I dont think one can have deep theory convos on most of this online stuff. When you say it like this, I agree and I am glad we could reach an understanding